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Synopsis
Praise for the Gabriel Du Pré Mysteries
Ash Child
“Bowen’s stories are always well constructed and very intelligent. . . . Like so many outstanding but wildly different crime series, from James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels to Steven Havill’s Bill Gastner series, the Du Pré stories are about a vanishing way of life and the determined souls who fight a rearguard action to keep it alive. . . . [A] dazzling entry in a wonderful series.”—-Booklist (starred review)
“Peter Bowen does for Montana what Tony Hillerman does for New Mexico. . . . picturesque, totally absorbing, and utterly charming . . . Anyone who has not read a Gabriel Du Pré mystery is missing out on something special.”—-Midwest Book Review
Cruzatte and Maria
“A fine introduction both to Bowen’s work and to another Montana—-that is, the real state behind the charmingly rustic dude ranch and country living fantasy . . . imaginative.”—-Ben Kaufmann, San Jose Mercury News
The Stick Game
“Bowen’s rock-hewn hero is a solid man with lusty appetites who loves red meat, liquor, and tobacco, plays a smoking fiddle, and is faithful to his woman. But a shrewd mind and wry sense of humor assert themselves eloquently in an austere tribal idiom that eschews such fluff as prepositions and rarely departs from the present tense of language—-and of life.”—-Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Long Son
“Peter Bowen writes about the rural West better than just about anyone . . . gets it right over and over again.”—-Rocky Mountain News
Publishers Weekly
Gabriel Du Pre, Bowen's hard-drinking, fast-driving, fiddle-playing western hero, investigates the activities of a sinister religious cult that purchases a huge cattle ranch in the 10th entry in this gripping and humorous series (after 2002's Ash Child). Du Pre's suspicions are aroused when the Host of Yahweh immediately destroys the ranch buildings, sells the livestock and erects a makeshift metal chapel for secret rites. Soon, reports of mass murders and suicides bring in cautious FBI agents ever mindful of the Waco debacle. Du Pre's blunt speech and sometimes opaque thought patterns can be hard to follow, but his pursuits of wrongdoers over cliffs, canyons and arid river beds are truly riveting. His encounters with Benetsee, a native seer and medicine man, are often comical, though the old man provides good counsel when the self-appointed sleuth, with a posse of deputies and federal agents, surround the compound for the final siege. Other denizens of remote Toussaint, Mont., including Du Pre's girlfriend, tough-minded bartender Madelaine, and his wayward granddaughter, Pallas, provide welcome diversions from the ominous goings-on behind the Host's electric fence. A buffalo stampede, tales of Indian lore and even the modern menace of biological weaponry lead to a just-in-the-nick-of-time finale. (May 5) FYI: Bowen is also the author of Kelly and the Three-Toed Horse (Forecasts, Feb. 26, 2001) and other titles in his Yellowstone Kelly historical series. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.